A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

A Tale of Murder, Lust, Greed, Revenge, and Seafood.

This is a very funny and generally entertaining film, the last great swan-song of brilliant creative humour (at least till now) of the legendary ex-Python, John Cleese, the writer, star and co-director. In the aftermath of a flawed jewel heist, compromised by witness identification of the gang leader, greed and distrust turn the four robbers against each other.

The film starts very succinctly by introducing the gang members, two American and two British, each with a passion, an idiosyncrasy, an Achilles' heel. Wanda, the glamorous and quick-thinking American girlfriend of the gang leader, George, is strongly aroused by the sound of foreign languages, a foible used to good comic effect. Otto, a dim-witted weapons expert, also American, and Wanda's secret lover, believing himself to be an intellectual, has a passion for the works of the philosopher, Nietzsche, though only limited comprehension. Ken, the getaway driver, a British man with a severe speech impediment, a stutter, and a tank full of tropical fish, ironically, given later developments, is a keen animal-lover. Only the leader, George, has no real identifiable passion, unless it be for diamonds. The only chinks in his armour are his trust in Wanda, shown from the outset to be double-timing him with Otto, and his identification by an elderly pedestrian at or near the scene of the robbery.

The plot develops briskly, alternating between the story-lines of defence barrister, Archie Leach (Cleese), and the robbers, and then showing how these initially parallel story-lines converge, in satisfyingly unexpected ways.

The use of American actors is brilliant casting, as it allowed the filmmakers to market the film in the USA as an American film starring American actors (Kline and Curtis) in a story set in England, and to market the film in the UK as a British film starring the much-loved ex-Python comedians, Cleese and Palin, with the bonus of glamorous American guest stars. (Kline was awarded an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.)

The character and portrayal of Archie's wife, Wendy, by Maria Aitken, is superb. She absolutely nails the kind of highly educated, sharp-tongued, sharp-minded, upper-middle class English woman who can deflate a fool with words in less than a minute, and who will fearlessly attack those who wrong her.

The sub-text is perhaps that of hidebound British cultural norms contrasted with the apparent freedoms of the American way of life and the desirability of the exoticism of overseas cultures. This is explicitly bemoaned both by John Cleese's character, George's barrister (lawyer), Archie Leech, who is delighted by the refreshing directness of the American style of social interaction, and also by Otto, who despises English stereotypical reserve and diffidence as unmasculine. A lovely example is the contrast between the dull, middle-class bedtime ritual of Archie and his wife, Wendy, and the extravagant passionate foreplay of Otto and Wanda.

Another strand is that of the use of language. There is Ken, with his communication-impeding stutter, Otto, with his cod-Italian and his catch-phrases ("Asshole!" "What was the middle thing?" "Don't ever call me stupid."), Wanda, with her apparent ability to be sexually aroused by the sound of a foreign language, George, with his creative use of bad language, and Archie, whose job it is to speak in defence of criminals.

The only bum note, to my mind, is a moment, near the end, where Archie, the very English barrister, talking to Otto, impersonates in voice and mannerisms a larger-than-life character from the southern USA, thereby stretching audience credulity and surreptitiously breaking the fourth wall, allowing Cleese himself to break through with a little advertisement for the versatility of his own acting skills.

Apparently, according to Wikipedia, there is a reported case of somebody in a cinema actually dying of laughter while watching A Fish Called Wanda.

References

• Wikipedia: Modern deaths attributed to laughter
  

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• Director: Charles Crichton, John Cleese
• Writers: John Cleese, Charles Crichton
• Starring: John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin, Tom Georgeson, Maria Aitken, Patricia Hayes, Geoffrey Palmer

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• Rating: Exceptional
• When seen: 27 May 2011
• Where seen: School
• More information: IMDB | RottenTomatoes | Wikipedia

Posted from my MacBook Pro with the assistance of TextWrangler

The Apartment (1960)

Movie-wise, there has never been anything like it - laugh-wise, love-wise, or otherwise-wise!

The Apartment (1960) would make an interesting double bill with The Seven Year Itch, directed by Billy Wilder only five years earlier. Both films share the theme of affairs between married men and single women in New York City, including that crucial month or two in the summer when it seems many wives and children escaped the heat of the city on extended summer vacations, leaving married men to their own devices.

The themes are similar, but the story-telling is at a different level of expertise. The Seven Year Itch was a leery cartoonish comedy that winked at the temptations confronting married men, mixed with a meta-discussion of the impact of sex symbols such as Marilyn Monroe, and the somewhat disturbing excesses of male fandom. In The Apartment, Wilder has progressed to a dramatic comedy grounded in believable characters, with life-changing outcomes at stake, a film with real emotional heft.

Ambitious young company employee, C.C. Baxter, is one face among many in the serried ranks of wage slaves in the cavernous financial department of Consolidated Life. an insurance company on the nineteenth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, and a long way back in the normal line of seniority for promotion to an office of his own, or even ultimately, a key to the executive washroom. But he has found a possible short-cut. As well as frequently working late as unpaid overtime, he finds that he can curry favour with a small stable of middle managers of less than impeccable morals, by loaning out his apartment to them for their clandestine trysts.

Trouble is, the popularity of this venue amongst the managers creates scheduling problems for Baxter, the late nights waiting for the all-clear take a toll on his health, and there is little time left for him to develop a private life. What's more, ironically, given his apparent monk-like existence, the loud carousing coming almost nightly, in his absence, from his apartment, and physical evidence of excessive alcohol consumption, has given Baxter the reputation with his neighbours, a stolid medical doctor and his wife, of being a philandering libertine. When he does manage to get time in the apartment himself, there is little for him to do but eat a solitary TV dinner and read himself to sleep.

The one ray of light in the desolation of Baxter's personal life is a sweet lovely young elevator operator, Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). On the day that Baxter's extended deprivations seem to be having the desired outcome, he asks her out on a date. But she already has an appointment to meet someone, a high ranking executive at the company, Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), a middle-aged family man, with whom she had an extended summer romance, and for whom she is nursing a broken heart.

The real theme of The Apartment is that of loneliness, primarily the loneliness of young single people in a big city. Baxter's loneliness manifests itself in his misguided desire for acceptance in the workplace, and the mistaken perception that his stable of managers like him because of the favours he does for them. On the contrary, the indications are that they dislike being beholden to him: they call him "buddy boy" in a way that suggests he is far from their buddy; they pressure him to give them time in his apartment even when it is clearly very inconvenient for him; they even give his home address out to someone who wishes him harm. Miss Kubelik's loneliness manifests itself in the affair she has had with a married man. But perhaps this affair is not surprising: if young single eligible men like Baxter are busy climbing corporate ladders, where else can she find affection?

Fran Kubelik has aspects in common with the other women in the story, and aspects that differentiate her from them. Like them, she has had an affair with a married man, but unlike them, although heart-broken, her nature is still unspoilt. By comparison, the other women appear coarse, that is to say, coarsened by experience, by repeated disappointment and loss of hope. From the blowsy switchboard operator to the ditzy Monroe lookalike/soundalike in the bar, these women seem to given up looking for lasting love and happiness, and are settling for temporary kicks. Then there's the lonely wife of the jailed jockey, actively seeking out male company on New Year's Eve, like a forlorn reflection of the plight of married men in the summer. She seems to still love her husband, but just needs someone to hold for the night. Maybe these married men had flings with their secretaries, switchboard operators, etc, not because they were cynical thrill seekers, but because they too in their way were lonely.

As for Baxter's middle-aged middle managers, they are a disappointing lot: "happily" married men cynically using the apartment for assignations with long-term mistresses and one-night stands. When they mistakenly get the idea that Baxter has bedded Miss Kubelik, they respond as if it were a challenging sporting achievement. Jeff Sheldrake, Miss Kubelik's ex-lover, however, seems to be a different kind of person, ready to do the right thing for the love of his life. His character is the key to the question of whether a single woman like Fran Kubelik is likely to find happiness with a married man.

Jack Lemmon's performance as Baxter is exemplary. Technically, he is magnificent. Which actor was it who said the best advice he ever got was to do (physical) things quickly, lighting up a cigarette, packing something away, whatever. These sequences of actions may be unavoidable, but dramatically, they are dead time, and it's vital to move on as fast as possible to other more dramatic events. Lemmon exemplifies this skills in various bits of business in the apartment: getting a TV dinner ready, cooking spaghetti, etc. Fortunately, briskness of action fits in well with Baxter's rather frenetic character. This nervousness combines with his characteristic optimistic cheeriness, like a mask, which counterpoints nicely with his essential loneliness. Just the sound of him in the kitchen, humming operatic snatches in a kind of desperately cheery way (according to Wikipedia improvised by Lemmon), are very poignant. The business with the tennis racket too is very good. It makes the otherwise mundane cooking process unusual and interesting to watch. It adds a slightly creative, kooky angle to Baxter's character. It's a good illustration of the kind of makeshift rough-and-ready domesticity of the single male in the kitchen.

Shirley MacLaine is wonderful in the role of Miss Kubelik, combining the unthreatening approachability of the girl-next-door with an adorable sunny sweetness, cuteness and specialness, so that the women in the audience will identify with her and want the best for her, and the men, identifying with Baxter, will want to be with her. MacMurray is fine as Sheldrake. There are some excellent supporting actors, including Dr Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen) and Mrs Dreyfuss (Naomi Stevens), the switchboard operator, and especially, the jockey's wife.

In short, The Apartment is an exceptional dramatic comedy with great story, script, characters, and performances.

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• Director: Billy Wilder
• Writers: Billy Wilder, IAL Diamond
• Starring: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston, Jack Kruschen, David Lewis, Joan Shawlee, Naomi Stevens, Edie Adams, Hope Holiday

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• Rating: Exceptional
• When seen: 6 July 2011
• Where seen: Home, on iPad
• More information: IMDB | RottenTomatoes | Wikipedia

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Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France...

A terrific film in almost every aspect: story, characters, script, direction and acting. After the doldrums of Kill Bill 1 (2003) (so disappointing that I couldn't bring myself to see Kill Bill 2, 2004) and the IQ-lowering Death Proof (2007), this is a welcome return by Quentin Tarantino to the kind of brilliance displayed in the earlier work, Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), that inspired a generation of young film-makers. According to Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglourious_Basterds], the first draft of the script was written in 1998, before Kill Bill and Death Proof. It seems the script went through some significant changes along the way, so hopefully this current return to form is not limited to projects from his back catalogue but is a pointer to the future.

The story is set in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, in a kind of alternate universe where the fixed historical realities of our world do not apply. The plot essentially centres around an Allied mission to assassinate a number of prominent Nazi government officials at a film premiere. The Basterds of the title are a volunteer group of Nazi-hating American soldiers, headed by First Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), working clandestinely behind enemy lines to instill fear into the hearts and minds of Nazi soldiers through acts of ruthless savagery, consciously creating a word-of-mouth reputation of mythical terror that can strike with impunity, anywhere, anytime. The other characters include French Jews, notably Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), either in hiding or striving to maintain a false public identity; a magnificently skillful Jew-hunting "national security" SD officer, Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz); an equally perceptive Gestapo officer, Major Dieter Hellstrom (August Diehl); a British secret agent with fluent German, Lieutenant Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender); and German film star Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger).

As well as these principal characters, there are a good number of ordinary German soldiers and civilians. With the premise of the Basterds' mission being that it is fine to kill Nazis, interestingly, these "ordinary" Germans are written and played not as cartoonish caricatures, but as fully realised, rounded, sometimes likeable, even in some cases admirable human beings. I found myself wondering what part if any these people would have played in the atrocities committed by their government. Did they all deserve a grisly fate, or were some just soldiers at war, patriotic as any people at war might be about their country? The mission of the Basterds, to kill all Nazis, seemed harsh to my modern eyes, if the term "Nazi" includes normal German people caught up in a war not of their own making.

The film is a showcase for and a discussion of Hitchcock's famous formula for suspense (Hitchcock/Truffaut, 1985, by François Truffaut, Simon and Schuster, see also Themes and plot devices in the films of Alfred Hitchcock) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themes_and_plot_devices_in_the_films_of_Alfred_Hitchcock], in which, as I understand it, explaining how to create suspense, Hitchcock describes a scenario where two people are talking in a room with a bomb under the table. In order to create suspense, Hitchcock explained, the audience needs to know about the bomb. If the audience doesn't know about the bomb, and the bomb goes off, it will be a surprise but nothing more. It is with the knowledge of the existence of bomb, that in the minds of the audience, over time, suspense can be built. In fact, the longer the bomb does not go off, the greater the suspense. In Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino puts metaphorical bombs under a lot of tables, and tells the audience about many of them. As the audience spend time with the participants, the metaphorical bomb under the table raises the level of the stakes (the perceived value of the outcome) for each participant, and correspondingly, ratchets up feelings of suspense.

Amusingly, in one key scene, Tarantino reverses the formula, so that for most of the scene, while the participants know, or suspect, that there's a non-literal bomb under the table, the audience is only later told of its existence, though, from the demeanour of the characters, the audience will rightly suspect that something is amiss but not quite know what. This is more like the Hemingway edict, if memory serves, consciously trialled in the short story "A Clean Well-lighted Place" (1926), where a tragic event is never explicitly stated, that you don't need to explicitly include the main event driving the plot, e.g. the climactic suicide, as its occurrence will be active in more or less subtle ways in other parts of the story, like the invisible parts of the iceberg that hit the Titanic. (For interesting discussion of alternatives to Hitchcock's classic formula for suspense, see "Building a Better Bomb: The Alternatives to Suspense" Peet Gelderblom, 19 October 2008, [http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/?p=2030])

The other edict Tarantino seems to follow (one for which I can't find a reference online, and would welcome one) is that, films being essentially a sequence of scenes, if a filmmaker aims to make a great film, it must include half a dozen or so really great scenes, which Basterds does. Where Tarantino excels, in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Inglourious Basterds, is in setting up (physically) fairly static scenarios marked by really kick-ass dialogue. The dialogue, in itself, is often concerned with apparently mundane topics, such as pop culture, food and drink, but nevertheless, because of clear conflict of interests and high stakes (such as a figurative bomb under a table which the audience is well aware of), Tarantino's scenarios are full of suspense. One scene in particular in Inglourious Basterds, full of pleasantries about a family's health and the quality of drink on offer, parallels the technique used by Hemingway in the superb short story "The Killers" (1927), where the menace of two gangsters waiting in a restaurant to murder another character is mainly conveyed through the most banal exchanges, largely relating to the availability - or rather lack of availability - of food, but covering a potential for great violence.

The script includes some nice interplay between art and life, where one character, interacting with another character in person and also able to see that character in a fictive role on screen, is undone when the response to the fictive role supersedes that of the real person, fatally attributing the fictive character's motivation to the real person. While watching this film-within-a-film, which seems to be little more than a series of back-to-back killings, appreciated hugely, for the wrong reasons, by the kind of people most of us would not wish to be associated with, I thought it a neat commentary (inadvertent or not) on the poverty of interest of pure action films such as Kill Bill 1, to my mind is more like a test run of action sequences than a fully-fledged storied film. My brother, Rob, however, suggested that this partially glimpsed film sounded more like a Nazi version of the biopic, Sergeant York (1941) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergeant_York], for which Gary Cooper won a Best Actor Oscar in the title role, which follows a similar plot-line, or alternatively, To Hell and Back (1955) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Hell_and_Back_(film)], starring Audie Murphie as himself, another film about a WWII expert marksman who single-handedly takes on a large number of enemy soldiers.

As for the performances, as a director, Tarantino must be doing something very right, as he has assembled a brilliant cast and got fantastic performances by almost everyone. Of particular note are:

• Christoph Waltz, superb as the character of the charming "national security" officer and rightly received various prestigious awards, including "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe, as well as (confusingly), Best Leading Actor at Cannes
• August Diehl as the Gestapo officer in the beer cellar
• Michael Fassbinder as a British secret agent
• Diane Kruger as a German film star
• Mélanie Laurent as a French Jew
• Daniel Brühl as a German hero

The only slight question mark in my mind hangs over Brad Pitt's portrayal of First Lieutenant Raine, leader of the Basterds. It's a difficult role, with little shading to it, and he plays it with a good deal of swagger, like an old-fashioned swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks or (American) Errol Flynn, mixed with the ruthlessness of a military Clark Gable or a mercenary Lee Marvin. My reservation is that his portrayal, or at least the camera's representation of his portrayal, does not take us into his thought processes, resulting in a person without depth of feeling beyond the actions required, so it's tricky to judge whether or not he is a trustworthy guide to the rights and wrongs of dealing with Nazis. Is he a good man who has embraced a distasteful but essential duty, or a cheerfully heartless executioner? Trying to think of another actor for the role, Sam Shepherd as Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff (1983), comes to mind as having the requisite phlegmatic unflappability and toughness and machismo. There's a quiet intelligence behind the eyes there that Pitt doesn't seem to attempt.

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• Director: Quention Tarantino
• Writer: Quention Tarantino
• Starring: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Mélanie Laurent, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger, Eli Roth

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• Rating: Exceptional
• When seen: 24 Jun 2011
• Where seen: Home
• More information: IMDB | RottenTomatoes | Wikipedia

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